Authors: Theda Perdue
ISBN-13: 9780195130812, ISBN-10: 0195130812
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: March 2001
Edition: 1st Edition
Theda Perdue is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998) and The Cherokee Removal (1995).
In this edited volume, Theda Perdue, a nationally known expert on Indian history and southern women's history, offers a rich collection of biographical essays on Native American women. From Pocahontas, a Powhatan woman of the seventeenth century, to Ada Deer, the Menominee woman who headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1990s, the essays span four centuries. Each one recounts the experiences of women from vastly different cultural traditionsthe hunting and gathering of Kumeyaay culture of Delfina Cuero, the pueblo society of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez, and the powerful matrilineal kinship system of Molly Brant's Mohawks. Contributors focus on the ways in which different women have fashioned lives that remain firmly rooted in their identity as Native women. Perdue's introductory essay ties together the themes running through the biographical sketches, including the cultural factors that have shaped the lives of Native women, particularly economic contributions, kinship, and belief, and the ways in which historical events, especially in United States Indian policy, have engendered change.
About the Author:
Theda Perdue is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998) and The Cherokee Removal (1995).
Contributors | ||
Introduction | 3 | |
1 | Pocahontas: The Hostage Who Became Famous | 14 |
2 | Mary Musgrove: Creating a New World | 29 |
3 | Molly Brant: From Clan Mother to Loyalist Chief | 48 |
4 | Sacagawea: The Making a Myth | 60 |
5 | Catharine Brown: Cherokee Convert to Christianity | 77 |
6 | Lozen: An Apache Woman Warrior | 92 |
7 | Mourning Dove: Gender and Cultural Mediation | 108 |
8 | Gertrude Simmons Bonnin: For the Indian Cause | 127 |
9 | Lucy Nicolar: The Artful Activism of a Penobscot Performer | 141 |
10 | Maria Montoya Martinez: Crafting a Life, Transforming a Community | 160 |
11 | Alice Lee Jemison: A Modern "Mother of the Nation" | 175 |
12 | Delfina Cuero: A Native Woman's Life in the Borderlands | 187 |
13 | Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash: An American Indian Activist | 204 |
14 | Ada Deer: Champion of Tribal Sovereignty | 223 |
Further Reading | 243 | |
Index | 249 |